We’re at the beginning of a brand new year, which means there’s no better time to look ahead and start planning your upcoming hardware purchases. If you’re like me, you’ve got a few pieces of aging hardware that you’ve been putting off updating and it’s just about time to give in and make a trip to the Apple Store.

In today’s poll, we want to know which Apple product is at the top of your list. Is it time to finally give in and pick up the MacBook Air that you’ve been drooling over or are you tired of working on a tiny screen and ready to switch to a 27″ iMac?

After you leave your vote, tell us about your purchase timeline in the comment area below. For instance, if you’re going to pick up a new iPad, will you wait for the iPad 3 or grab an iPad 2 sometime in the next few months?

“It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”
- Steve Jobs

According to Walter Isaacson, these words were spoken by Steve Jobs regarding a new television that Apple is working on (reportedly not a set-top box like the Apple TV but a real television). Over the past couple of months the rumor mill has been overflowing with speculation and supposed proof surrounding this mysterious device.

The only thing that we know for certain at this point is that we currently have no way of knowing which rumors are true, which are pure fabrication and which are somewhere in between.

One of the most interesting points of speculation surrounding the Apple television (iTV?) is the timeline. Some say that the device is something that Apple is planning for the distant future, perhaps when the cost of displays comes down. Others see a 2012 release as imminent.

What do you think? Is this thing real? If so, will we get our hands on it in 2012? Cast your vote in the poll and explain your answer in the comment section below.

Can you believe it’s been almost a year since the Mac App Store first launched? Today I was poking around store and had a look at the Purchases tab. Here you can see everything you’ve ever downloaded from the store. My list has over forty items dating all the way back to my very first download: Twitter for Mac on January 6, 2011 (an app I still use daily).

For today’s poll question, stop by your own list of purchases and tell us how many apps you’ve downloaded over the past year. Once you’ve answered the poll, tell us your thoughts about the Mac App Store in the comments section below. Have you found it to be as useful as you thought it would be? Do you use the apps you’ve downloaded regularly or are they collecting dust in your Applications folder?

By now many or even most of you have gotten a chance to really dig into Apple’s latest operating system: OS X Lion. This update was a significant one and brought about tons of changes from both a visual and functional standpoint. With this in mind, we already can’t help but to look toward the next iteration and wonder what’s in store, not just from a new feature standpoint but regarding which existing features Apple will decide to refine.

Today we want to know what you would like Apple to take another run at designing. Whether it’s a brand new feature like Mission control or something that’s been there since the beginning like Finder, which piece of OS X are you really hoping will see a major facelift next time around?

Vote in the poll and then leave a comment below telling us what you would change and why.

One of the features that people seemed most excited about getting their hands on in Lion was fullscreen apps. Plenty of apps jumped on this trend well before Apple built in support for doing so, but for the most part, having a distinctly fullscreen mode is a fairly new development to the Mac app world. Even with Lion’s release being months past, many developers are only just now starting to adopt this feature. Odds are most of your apps don’t yet possess a fullscreen mode.

Today we want to know if the reality lived up to the hype. Do you enjoy using apps in fullscreen mode? Vote in the poll and tell us how many you currently use this way, then leave a comment below and let us know which apps specifically you like to operate in fullscreen.

A big thanks to Scott Danielson for submitting this poll idea via Twitter. Shoot us a tweet at @MacAppStorm with the hashtag “#appstormpoll” if you have a poll idea you’d like to see published.

As of 1 March, 2012, all new apps/updates submitted to the Mac App Store will be forced to implement a security feature called sandboxing. In brief, sandboxing limits the scope of each application by restricting how much of your system that app has access to. Developers will have to go through Apple and request specific entitlements in order to receive permission to stretch the limits a little further and give their apps access to certain information.

The benefit here is obvious, your system will be much safer given the restricted access that apps will have. The downside though is a big one for seasoned Mac users and developers of particularly powerful utilities as this restriction has serious potential to limit features. As Techworld.com reports, Alfred’s developers have hesitated to submit the Alfred Powerpack to the Mac App Store for this very reason.

Back in June, I wrote and published an article titled“1984 and the Future of Mac Software” containing a fairly gloomy outlook on the future of the Mac should it continue down its current road towards heavier developer regulation. It seems fairly obvious that Apple wants control over every aspect of what does and doesn’t make its way onto your Mac. That’s not inherently a bad thing though, iOS serves as a great example of a successful system (that users love) which happens to be very tightly controlled by Apple.

Ultimately, whether or not sandboxing is a good thing is completely up to you. We want to hear what you think. Vote in the poll above and leave a comment explaining your answer.

Hat tip to SmileyKeith for submitting this poll idea via Twitter. Shoot us a tweet at @MacAppStorm with the hashtag “#appstormpoll” if you have a poll idea you’d like to see published.

After at least a year of rumors about an Apple cloud service and months of anticipation after the official announcement was made, we’ve finally gotten our hands on iCloud. It’s the perfect example of how Apple doesn’t always get things right from the start. They started with .Mac, evolved that into the train wreck that was MobileMe and have hopefully finally gotten things right this time around with iCloud.

Now that you’ve had a little while to kick the tires, it’s time to weigh in. What do you think of iCloud? Is it everything you hoped it would be or did all that hype lead to a disappointing reality? We want to know!

After you vote in the poll, leave a comment below telling us about your iCloud experience. Tell us your horror stories and your raving praise, let’s hear it all.

Though several of us had dreams of lining up in bookstores and having Steve personally sign a copy of his upcoming biography, sadly we know now that day will never come. Though you can still hope to catch author Walter Isaacson and thank him for his work in penning the stories of the father of modern computing.

If you’re like me, you’ve been looking forward to this book for quite a while. The official release date, October 24th, is quickly approaching and today’s poll question asks whether or not you plan on picking up your own copy. Will you preorder it? Wait for it to hit bookstores? Reserve it at the library? We want to know.

After you vote, leave a comment below and let us know whether you’ll be grabbing the hard copy or perhaps reading it on your iPad as a tribute to those amazing devices Steve spent the latter half of his career perfecting.

I’m a fortunate soul who hasn’t really been forced to use a Windows PC since elementary school. For the most part, I get by entirely on Macs both for home and work use.

I recently had the realization though that not every Mac user is quite so lucky. I know several people who love Macs, own Macs and would prefer to use them 100% of the time, but are still forced to use the standard issue Dell or HP provided their employer.

Today we want to know what your situation is with Macs and PCs. Do you use a Mac at home, work or both? For the sake of simplicity, we’ll lump student work and schools in with work.

After you vote in the poll, leave a comment and tell us if you ever use a Windows PC and why. Do you personally find a need to use Windows frequently? Are you being forced? Do you like it just as much or better for certain tasks?

Last week while researching an introduction to Disk Utility I came across some extremely varied arguments regarding the usefulness of repairing permissions (check out that article for a discussion of what repairing permissions actually does).

I’ve personally long seen “Repair Permissions” as a nice little troubleshooting tool that I turn to when nothing else seems to solve a given issue. If something isn’t working quite right and I can’t hunt down the source of the problem, I repair my permissions to see if the situation improves. Sometimes it does, many times it doesn’t. Either way, it’s always worth a shot!

In my research, I came across tons of other people who seem to share this sort of “cure all” mentality towards repairing permissions. Some go so far as to recommend repairing permissions as part of setting up daily maintenance scripts.

On the other side of the argument though there are folks that don’t see much, if any, value in this action. There’s an old blog post on the Unsanity site actually titled “Repairing Permissions is Useless,” which makes a very informed case against the idea that repairing permissions is a solution to a wide variety of problems, though the author does in fact accept that it should be tried as a last resort.

Today I want to know what you think. Help me decide whether or not to keep repairing permissions on my list of go-to strategies for troubleshooting. Vote in the poll and let us know how often you repair permissions, then leave a comment below with your argument for or against the action!